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THE PUBLISHED FIGURES · 1899 TO 1919
The federal count: The Census of Manufactures gives the transformation a spine of numbers. For the city of Fort Wayne it counted, in 1899, an average of 6,519 wage earners producing goods valued at $11,262,672; in 1904, 7,729 wage earners and $14,011,356; and in 1909, 10,298 wage earners and $23,686,809. Wage earners rose 33.2 percent and the value of products 69.1 percent in the five years 1904–1909 alone, after rising 18.6 and 24.4 percent in the five before. Fort Wayne ranked third among Indiana's manufacturing cities in 1909, behind Indianapolis and South Bend, and the census named its most important industries as foundries and machine shops and the manufacture of electrical machinery, apparatus and supplies. The census itself warned readers, of the state figures, that rising values were in part rising prices — a caution that applies with doubled force to the war-inflated 1919 figures below.
The local count: The city's own compilation, printed in the Polk directory of 1907 from a count brought down to April 1906, classed 240 of the town's 1,238 business and industrial institutions as manufacturing; its detailed table for 1905 covered 200 concerns with $12,981,853 of capital invested, 8,224 wage earners paid $3,919,588 in wages — 9,189 employees in all, drawing $4,931,716 in salaries and wages together — and products valued at $15,129,652, up 34.3 percent from the $11.26 million the same table assigned to 1900. (The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica prints the 1905 product value as $15,129,562 — a $90 difference in transcription against the directory's $15,129,652; the directory, as the originating compilation, is followed here.) The count's 1900 wage-earner figure, 6,519, is the census's 1899 figure wearing a new label — the census year 1899 was enumerated in 1900 — and the two series agree where they overlap.
The war jump: The Fourteenth Census figures for 1919, reprinted in the Fort Wayne telephone directory of 1924, show the build-out completing itself: establishments rose from 228 in 1914 to 247 in 1919; persons engaged in industry from 13,416 to 20,462 (up 52.5 percent); capital from $31,167,000 to $55,303,000; the value of products from $30,205,000 to $76,713,000 (up 154 percent); and payrolls from $8,935,000 to $24,685,000 (up 176 percent) — the money figures swollen by wartime prices, the people figures not: twenty thousand Fort Wayne residents now worked in manufacturing, in a city of 86,549. The same directory boasted, in the booster language of 1924, that the largest oil tank and pump factory and the largest motor truck factory in the world, and the largest lisle hosiery mill, car-wheel factory and enameled copper wire plant in the United States, were all in Fort Wayne — a claim, printed here as the claim it was, whose individual pieces the entries below take up.
Sources: Thirteenth Census, Vol. IX, Manufactures 1909, Indiana chapter and city table (the 1899/1904/1909 wage-earner and product figures, the third-place ranking, the leading industries, and the census's own price caution); R. L. Polk & Co., Fort Wayne City Directory 1907, "Manufacturing Interests of Fort Wayne" (the 1905/1900 local compilation); 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, "Fort Wayne" (the $15,129,562 variant and the 1905 ranking first in the state for cars constructed and repaired by steam-railway companies); Fort Wayne Telephone Directory 1924 (the 1914/1919 growth table and the 1924 booster claims).